Complete Works of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  Taking all three stories together, we should classify Mr. Crane as a rather promising writer of the animalistic school. His types are mainly human beings of the order which makes us regret the power of literature to portray them. Not merely are they low, but there is little that is interesting in them. We resent the sense that we must at certain points resemble them. Even the old mother is not made pathetic in a human way; her son disgusts us Bo that we have small power of sympathy with her left. Maggie it is impossible to weep over. We can feel only that it is a pity that the gutter is so dirty, and turn in another direction. In short, Mr. Crane’s Art is to us very depressing. Of course, there is always the crushing reply that one who does not love art for the sake of art is a poor devil, not worth writing for. But we do not; we do not even love literature for its own sake.

  It is only fair to say that what we have called animalism others pronounce wonderful realism. We use the word animalism for the sake of clearness, to denote a species of realism which deals with man considered as an animal, capable of hunger, thirst, lust, cruelty, vanity, fear, sloth, predacity, greed, and other passions and appetites that make him kin to the brutes, but which neglects, so far as possible, any higher qualities which distinguish him from his four-footed relatives, such as humor, thought, reason, aspiration, affection, morality, and religion. Real life is full of the contrasts between these conflicting tendencies, but the object of the animalistic school seems always to make a study of the genus homo which shall recall the menagerie at feeding-time rather than human society.

  From: Munsey’s Magazine, V. XIV, No. 4, January 1896, p.503-504

  A PROMISING AMERICAN REALIST.

  Mr. Stephen Crane is a young man who has been called names. The publication of “The Black Riders,” last year, called forth from some enthusiastic critic the assertion that the author was the “Aubrey Beardsley of poetry.” The majority of readers were satisfied to accept this statement, being unable to find in “The Black Riders” much more sobriety that is discernible in Mr. Beardsley’s bizarre drawings.

  Another critic has said that Mr. Crane’s new book, “The Red Badge of Courage,” is written by the “American Zola “; and still a third announces him to be “the bright star of the renaissance in fiction.” We were therefore prepared for something startling in “The Red Badge,” and it is well we were. It is a story of exceeding strangeness, with no visible plot, but dabbled profusely with singular fancies and word pictures. Mr. Crane rejoices in surprising his readers. He scorns conventionality, and lies awake at night thinking up new expressions. When his characters swear it is with “crimson oaths”; bullets “spang” into trees; stars lie “like glittering pebbles on the black level of the night”; and the sun itself breaks loose from accepted metaphor and is “pasted in the sky like a wafer.”

  From all this it might appear that Mr. Crane’s imagination runs away with rhyme and reason; and in the case of “The Black Riders” such was assuredly the fact. But in “The Red Badge” there is a more substantial quality than mere eccentricity. His writings, to be sure, are an acquired taste. One must become hardened to having everything described as “murder red,” and to having one’s composure startled by lurid similes. This achieved, there conies a realization that Mr. Crane possesses a power of his own, a knowledge of truth, and an ability to portray it forcefully. The battlefield is no longer the conventional scene of heroism, but the arena of very human emotions in which fear is realistically prominent.

  Mr. Crane is only twenty four, but his literary career is already eight years old. He began writing for the press before he was sixteen, and his first book—”Maggie, a Girl of the Streets “ — was published some three years ago without creating an appreciable sensation. Hamlin Garland, who is something of a realist himself, said in a review of it: “With such a technique already in command, with life mainly before him, Stephen Crane is henceforth to be reckoned with.” The further development of the young writer’s ability has fulfilled this prophecy. Mr. Crane will doubtless be reckoned with mercilessly in many quarters, so long as he persists in his riotous style; but it is to be hoped that this will not discourage him. He is one of the most original writers of the day.

  From: The Arena, June 1893, p.xi-xii

  “An Ambitious French Novel and a Modest American Story” by Hamlin Garland

  …”Maggie; A Story of New York.” This is of more interest to me, both because it is the work of a young man, and also because it is a work of astonishingly good style. It deals with poverty and vice and crime also, but it does so, not out of curiosity, not out of salaciousness, but because of a distinct art impulse, the desire to utter in truthful phrase a certain rebellious cry. It is the voice of the slums. It is not written by a dilettante; it is written by one who has lived the life. The young author, Stephen Crane, is a native of the city, and has grown up in the very scenes he describes. His book is the most truthful and unhackneyed study of the slums I have yet read, fragment though it is. It is pictorial, graphic, terrible in its directness. It has no conventional phrases. It gives the dialect of the slums as I have never before seen it written — crisp, direct, terse. It is another locality finding voice.

  It is important because it voices the blind rebellion of Rum Alley and Devil’s Row. It creates the atmosphere of the jungles, where vice testers and crime passes gloomily by, where outlawed human nature rebels against God and man.

  The story fails of rounded completeness. It is only a fragment. It is typical only of the worst elements of the alley. The author should delineate the families living on the next street, who live lives of heroic purity and hopeless hardship.

  The dictum is amazingly simple and fine for so young a writer. Some of the words illuminate like flashes of light. Mr. Crane is only twenty-one years of age, and yet he has met and grappled with the actualities of the street in almost unequalled grace and strength. With such a technique already at command, with life mainly before him, Stephen Crane is to be henceforth reckoned with. “Maggie” should be put beside “Van Bibber” to see the extremes of New York as stated by two young men. Mr. Crane need not fear comparisons so far as technique goes, and Mr. Davis will need to step forward right briskly or he may be overtaken by a man who impresses the reader with a sense of almost unlimited resource.

  HAMLIN GARLAND.

  From: The Saturday Review, V. 82, No. 2147, December 19, 1896, p.655

  ANOTHER VIEW OF “MAGGIE.” by H. G. Wells

  “Maggie: a Child of the Streets.” By Stephen Crane. London: William Heinemann. 1896.

  The literature of the slum multiplies apace; and just as the mud of the Port of London has proved amenable to Mr. Whistler, so the mud of the New York estuary has furnished material for artistic treatment to Mr. Crane. Mr. Crane, in “Maggie,” shows himself the New York equivalent of Mr. Morrison, with perhaps a finer sense of form and beauty and a slenderer physique. He is the light weight of the two. He is far more alert for what the industrious playwright calls the effective “line,” and every chapter cocks its tail with a point to it. He sketches, for instance, the career of Maggie’s brother James, and tells of his lusts and brutality. “Nevertheless,” ends the chapter, “he had on a certain starlit evening said wonderingly and quite reverently, ‘Dah moon looks like h — l, don’t it?’” And with that the chapter, rather self-consciously, pauses for your admiration. Of Mr. Morrison’s “Dick Perrott” it is not recorded that he ever saw the beauty of moonlight or the stars. But one may doubt, even after the chromatic tumult of the “Red Badge of Courage,” whether Mr. Crane is anywhere equal to Mr. Morrison’s fight between Perrott and Leary. To read that and to turn to Mr. Crane’s fight between Maggie’s brother and her seducer is to turn from power to hysterics. The former is too strong and quiet to quote — it must be read; but of the latter: —

  “The arms of the combatants whirled in the air like flails. The faces of the men, at first flushed to flame-coloured anger, now began to fade to the pallor of warriors in the blood and heat of a bat
tle. Their lips curled back, stretched tightly over the gums in ghoul-like grins. Through their white, gripped teeth struggled hoarse whisperings of oaths. Their eyes glittered with murderous fire. . . . Blows left crimson blotches upon the pale skin. . . . The rage of fear shone in all their eyes, and their blood-coloured fists whirled. . . . The pyramids of shimmering glasses, that had never been disturbed, changed to cascades as heavy bottles were flung into them. Mirrors splintered to nothing. The three frothing creatures on the floor buried themselves in a frenzy for blood. . . . The quiet stranger had sprawled very pyrotechnically out on the sidewalk.”

  Which is very fine, no doubt, but much more suggestive of a palette dipped in vodki than of two men fighting. Yet, on the other hand, the emotional power of that concluding chapter of “Maggie” seems a little out of Mr. Morrison’s reach — the old woman, drink sodden and obese, stricken with the news of her daughter’s death and recalling her one vivid moment of maternal pride.

  “Jimmy, boy, go get yer sister! Go get yer sister an’ we’ll put dah boots on her feet!”

  The relative merits of the “Red Badge of Courage” and “Maggie” are open to question. To the present reviewer it seems that in “Maggie” we come nearer to Mr. Crane’s individuality. Perhaps where we might expect strength we get merely stress, but one may doubt whether we have not been hasty in assuming Mr. Crane to be a strong man in fiction. Strength and gaudy colour rarely go together; tragic and sombre are well nigh inseparable. One gets an impression from the “Red Badge” that at the end Mr. Crane could scarcely have had a gasp left in him — that he must have been mentally hoarse for weeks after it. But here he works chiefly for pretty effects, for gleams of sunlight on the stagnant puddles he paints. He gets them, a little consciously perhaps, but, to the present reviewer’s sense, far more effectively than he gets anger and fear. And he has done his work, one feels, to please himself. His book is a work of art, even if it is not a very great or successful work of art — it ranks above the novel of commerce, if only on that account.

  H. G. W.

  From: The Academy, No. 1483, October 6, 1900, p.281

  Wounds in the Rain: Stories Relating to the Spanish-American War by Stephen Crane

  No one can escape, in reading this last of Mr. Crane’s extraordinary work, from the reflection that it ridiculously resembles his first. Almost every impression was preconceived in The Red Badge of Courage, and for verisimilitude the author might have stayed for the one as for the other in his own armchair, and never have gone at all to the wars. This might lead to either of two conclusions: that the reporter was obsessed by the author’s battles in the brain, or that the author had successfully divined truth which the reporter’s observation could but verify. Which, it were not easy to decide; especially because a large part of the observation, and that the most characteristic, is concerned altogether with the inner man. The objective operations are of secondary importance, and, as Mr. Crane tells them, are not always easy to follow; that which mainly interests him is the variation, under certain abnormal conditions, in the fundamental conceptions of time and space, the sharpening of the senses or their temporary anaesthesia, the effects of fear, the strange sources from which in emergency courage may derive; and what he is interested in, that he desires to express. “The battle broke with a snap far ahead. Presently Lige heard from the air far above a faint, low note as if somebody were blowing in the mouth of a bottle. It was a stray bullet that had wandered a mile to tell him that war was before him.” Then what? It may be observation, but the author of The Red Badge would easily have divined it: “he nearly broke his neck in looking upward.” Forthwith the Spanish guns become as it were articulate. “Ss-sa-swow-ow-ow-ow-pum “ — that is how they talk; also “flut-flut, flut, fluttery-flut-flllluttery-flut,” they say. Bullets sing, sping, spang, snap, snatch, shiver, sneer. The war correspondent in the derelict steel boiler meanwhile “dreams frantically of some anthracite hiding-place, some profound dungeon of peace, where blind mules chew placidly the far-gathered hay.” With nerves (to use his own phrase) standing on end like so many bristles, he writes like a man hag-rid by a terror of common things:

  Lying near one of the enemy’s trenches was a redheaded Spanish corpse. I wonder how many hundreds were cognisant of this red-headed Spanish corpse? It rose to the dignity of a landmark. There were many corpses, but only one with a red head. This red-head. He was always there. Each time I approached this part of the field I prayed that I might find that he had been buried. But he was always there — red-headed.

  Mr. Crane preserved to the last his Japanese-like sensitiveness to the paradox of perspective. Over and over again he points to it with a worried grin.

  There was a man in a Panama hat, walking with a stick! That was the strangest sight of my life — that symbol, that quaint figure of Mars. The battle, the thunderous row, was his possession. He was master. He mystified us all with his infernal Panama hat and his wretched walking-stick. From near his feet came volleys and from near his side came roaring shells, but he stood there alone, visible, the one tangible tiling. He was a Colossus, and he was half as high as a pin, this being.

  His description of the return of Hobson, of Merrimac fame, to the army, is a piece of saner observation:

  Most of the soldiers were sprawled out on the grass, bored and weary in the sunshine. However, they aroused at the old circus-parade, torch-light procession cry, “Here they come.” Then the men of the regular army did a thing. They rose en masse and came to “Attention.” Then the men of the regular army did another thing. They slowly lifted every weather-beaten hat and dropped it until it touched the knee. Then there was a magnificent silence, broken only by the measured hoof-beats of the company’s horses as they rode through the gap. . . .

  Then suddenly the whole scene went to rubbish. Before he reached the bottom of the hill, Hobson was bowing right and left like another Boulanger, and above the thunder of the massed binds one could hear the venerable outbreak, “Mr. Hobson, I’d like to shake the hand of the man who .”

  To our mind the finest work in the volume is the last story, “The Second Generation.” It is of wider scope than the rest, treating with serious purpose and in less unmeasured language of the consequences of inherited wealth and position. On the whole, however, this posthumous volume is a brilliant last word from one who had discovered himself completely from the beginning.

  From: The Academy, No.1493, December 15, 1900, p.603

  Whilomville Stories by Stephen Crane. (Harper. 6s.)

  No man — as we have before now pointed out-manifested so little progress as Mr. Crane: almost he may be said, in a literary sense, to have been born an adult. Thus these attempts upon Tom Sawyer subjects may be either early essays of the time when Crane was looking about the globe for the matter proper to his genius, or they may have been the fruit of recreatory moments during his short, brilliant career as a war correspondent 0r psychological artist of the battlefield. Extremely slight they are; in some the framework is almost too frail to bear the canvas on which he paints; but everywhere in the treatment of these children, no less than in the minute touches by which his ultra-sensitised mind reflected the humours, the gaieties, the bizarreries of the struggle against an armed landscape that is modern war, you find the marks of the wonderful beyondness that was his convincing effect. The absurdities of the playground, the jealousies of rival heroes, the boastfulness of the coward, the complacencies of the lickspittle — it is pleasant to see these things exposed. The Child in these days has been so boastfully set in the midst! Comes along a grown-up with a grain or two of observation and diligence, and, lo I our paragon is seen to be hardly wiser, simpler, juster, or truer than his parents and his grown-up neighbours. The fact is, we were conscious of a progressive fortification of our self-respect as we turned these satirical leaves. Mr. Newell’s pictures are no more indulgent than the pages they illustrate; but then, frankly, young children are rather grotesque: the most artistic nation of the world altogether reje
cted them.

  From: The Academy, No. 1506, March 16, 1901, p.230

  The Monster by Stephen Crane

  If Mr. Crane had written m thing else, this book would have wrested from the world an acknowledgment of his curious, searching gifts, and would have made him a reputation. Not that he is wholly represented here. The Crane of The Open Boat, of Maggie, of Death and the Child, of The Red Badge of Courage, is absent, or only fugitively present; but the quick, nervous, prehensile mind that in an instant could select the vital characteristics of any scene or group, is notably here; and here also in superabundance is the man’s grim fatalism, his saturnine pleasure in exhibiting (with bitter, laughing mercilessness) the frustrations of human efforts, the absurd trifles which decide human destiny. There is one story, for example, “Twelve o’Clock,” which tells how a young cowboy’s excitement on hearing a cuckoo-clock for the first time led indirectly to murder — all done with perfect credibility. Nothing but a kind of savage impatience with the accidentalism of the scheme of things could have caused a man to set down this particular story; but it is finely done — a triumph of narrative art. “The Blue Hotel ‘ is another excellent piece of work — the history of a quarrelsome night and its fatal issue — a nocturne in blood and whisky, with a curious thread of grotesque running through it, and a very peculiar knowledge of human nature in every line. The question, “Is it worth while?” had better, perhaps, not be asked. To our mind the art justifies it. “The Monster” itself, the title-story, has been praised in America with that warmth of praise for which the country is famous; but it is not better than “The Blue Hotel.” It is, however, an amazing story, with deeper interest, and the question, “Is it worth while?” is far le3s likely to be put. “Manacled” is an exercise in the horrible that does not quite succeed. “His New Mittens” belongs rightly to Whilomville Stories. The last story of all, “An Illusion in Red and White,” is a very delicate piece of gruesomeness. Altogether, the book is intensely alive and intelligent, and not by any means the kind of thing for nervous folk or for the “art-for-anything-else’s-sake-but-art” school.